TechStuff Looks Back at 2013 Part One

going to play out. In the past, we have often kind of commented on the stories as they happened throughout the year. That's generally what we're going to do today. But for any story that continued to develop throughout the year, we're just gonna tell as much of that story as we can when it first started happening, more or less, because we find that that's a lot easier to follow than to say this happened in January than we do

stories for February, March and in April. Hey you remember the thing that happened in January, Well here's where this happened, all right. Yeah, there's a couple of places where we either are are waiting until a larger event in the chain happened to to break it during our timeline or

exact yeah, exactly. In some cases we'll be talking about the biggest part of the story and we may say, oh, early in the year this happened, but we wanted to do it in such a way where you could get kind of the encapsulated version of that news story all at once, as opposed to spread out throughout the whole year. So any um, alien historians listening to this for like extreme accuracy purposes, just you know, slow down and take it all in. Also, welcome to the Gregorian calendar. Yeah,

that's exciting. So let's start, I suggest starting with January two, an excellent month of the Gregorian calendar to start with. Yes, okay, So the first thing that I have written down, we we kind of we didn't go day by day for the year, but we kind of lumped them together and stuff that happened in various months. The first story I wanted to mention was that that was when Kim dot com did a little press event where he unveiled his

plan of the mega website. And you know, Kim dot Com of course was one of the founders of Mega upload, and a year earlier, back in two thousand twelve, had his home rated by various law enforcement officials, and so this was on the anniversary of that big raid. He unveiled this new service called mega which is a file hosting service that also includes encryption so that you can

share files. You can you can upload a file and share it with people, and you can encrypt it so that anyone you don't want to share it with doesn't know what the heck you're messing with. So it's kind of a work around on some of the issues that Mega upload had where, you know, anyone who owned copyrighted material and saw it up on Mega upload would say, hey, you've got to take that down that belongs to me.

This way they can all they can say is there's stuff up there that may or may not belong to me, but I can't tell because it's all encrypted. Yeah, this this is part of a kind of law your theme of of a encryption and be uh file sharing kind of issues. It turns out that that's something that I doubt is going to go away anytime soon. Yeah. When we next have a story that has kind of one of the tragedies of this one is so close to

your heart. Um. This was a research in motion or a rim renaming itself BlackBerry and uh and launching the BlackBerry ten os UM and then kind of not really going anywhere after that. There were if you remember, back in two thousand twelve, there were a lot of analysts saying that BlackBerry ten os was going to be the make or break product for BlackBerry, that it was only if that that that new overhaul of the smartphone operating system that would be what would end up either saving

the company or it wouldn't be enough. And while BlackBerry is still around, it's certainly had a really rough year. In two thousand thirteen, they went so far as to say they were entertaining offers for people to come up and buy the company. However, uh, just recently, relatively recently as of the recording of this podcast, CEO John Chen sent out a letter to customers, enterprise customers meaning giant companies, saying that BlackBerry was no longer looking for a buyer.

They were going to to go this alone. They were going to continue to cater to their enterprise customers, but they were not going to try and sell off the company. UM. However they are basically any investors are being um, it's being recommended that investors sell off their BlackBerry stock. Things are not looking in the business industry like this is fun to go. When city groups said they're changing BlackBerry to sell that was that was not a good news

item for BlackBerry. So it continues to be a really rough year. Uh hey, you know what, have you ever wanted to be in pictures? I am in picture sometimes? Yeah? Have you what about moving pictures? I'm I'm in those yeah occasionally. Yeah. I like I like being in them. I really like them when they are six seconds long. Well, hey, there's an app for that. What Twitter had purchased this this little company called Vine in twelve and in January

unveiled the iOS vine app. Yep, And this was what let all those would be iPhone movie makers out there use their phones to create six second long looping videos, which some people did, and it was just kind of like ridiculous stuff that hardly anyone outside of a small group of friends would have ever taken notice of. Other people were using it as an actual means of artistic expression and using in a very kind of creative way.

But I mean, it's challenging. Right. It's just like in a way when you talk about the different types of fiction and how the shorter you get, the harder it is to write. So, for example, a good novel is hard to write, a good novella is harder to write. A good short story is really hard to write because as you're restricting yourself, every single word counts even more

than it would in a longer form. So you've got a six second movie, You've got to find a way of saying what you want to say in six seconds that really has an impact. And there's some people who are really good at it. Oh yeah, yeah, And it's also a terrific medium for for just main kind of stuff. Um, that's that's short and easy. And I saw some really cute ones this here. Yeah, I saw some great ones as well. But you know, I I don't really feel

comfortable limiting myself to six seconds. I need a little more than twice that, i'mount Is there anything out there for me? Well? In June, actually Facebook kind of caught up when they announced Instagram Video, right, that would allow you to do fifteen seconds of video and see there a lot of people were saying, you know, Facebook is playing hardball here by not allowing Vine to live on Facebook and instead having this competing product that could live

on Facebook. Meanwhile, Vine, of course, is doing quite well on Twitter. So you've got these two giant social media goliaths that are kind of, you know, trying to to push the other one out of the picture. As it turns out, I mean, I don't I don't know what the figures are because I didn't look them up. All I know is what my direct experience has been I've seen. And maybe it's because I'm not a big Instagram person, that's probably the main reason. But I've seen way more

Vine videos, and I've seen Instagram videos. I know more people personally making Instagram videos than I do personally making Vine videos. But overall, I have seen more propagation of Vine. Interesting. So you know, this obviously is all anecdotal, So it could very well be that, you know, and I mean,

there's way one of us is on the money here. Well, those and and those are those are trends of two you know, thirtiesome things who work in the tech sector, and and so you know this grain assault, but so what about you know, sticking with Facebook, they also in January launched something that I don't had a lot of buzz around it at the time. That was an interesting idea. It was called graph search, and this would let you use Facebook as a search engine to look for really

weird stuff. Like the examples they gave were always odd, so uh. An example I said was, I want to know what kind of music people who really enjoy planetarium's happen to like, and I could do a search on that, and Facebook has of course all that information of what people have liked and you know anything. Yeah, so then they would come back with well, people who said they liked planetariums also said they really like you know, I don't know Manner Asterman, which would make total sense that

that would be an example. But it's this kind of deep graph search, whereas a social search kind of thing. Um. I've only played with it a little bit and it doesn't seem to work that well for me. But it may just be that I'm using it wrong and then I'm too old. I haven't. I haven't experimented with it very much. But um, but I think that since the trends of overall Facebook getting older, I've probably indicates that

it's not that you're too old. It's just that it's not as functional as they had perhaps hoped it might be. That's very kind of you to say. I'd like to think that it's their fault, not mine. Also in January, Canonical announced that they would bring Ubuntu, the Linux distro, you know, it's a distribution of the Linux operating system. They would bring it to the mobile platforms. They would create a smartphone version of a Buntu in the near future.

That's the story would play out over two thousand thirteen, and it was not a particularly successful story either. In July, they announced a crowdfunding campaign to try and raise money on I think it was Indie Go Go for what they were calling the Ubuntu Edge, which would have been the first smartphone to feature this operating system. However, they hit a little bit of a roadblock. Yeah, they had a thirty two million dollar goal and they only made

nineteen of that. Actually are they They fell short by nineteen nineteen million dollars. I thought, I feel badly that my kick started campaign didn't fund, But um I got more than halfway to where I needed to be and they didn't quite make that. So well, but that's still I mean, they they still made. I mean, I'm having a lot of trouble subtracting right now then. Um but but I mean, but that's still you know what, like like eleven million dollars that they raised. I'm just saying

that's not terrible. Yeah, no, it's they didn't they weren't hunting for cash, but they didn't have enough to go through with what they planned. Did some subtractions so hard? Yeah, well, you know, we only like to add on tech stuff.

We hate taking stuff away. The Ubuntu Edge would have been eight thirty dollars to buy outright if it had come into existence now since then, back in December of two thousand thirteen, Canonical announced that some other as yet as of the recording of this podcast, and I should say recording this on December twelve, so so and anything that we get terribly weird of, especially towards the end, that's one of the reasons we're also terribly weird people.

So that also plays the department. But anyway, Canonical has said that some unnamed manufacturer would be producing the first ubun two smartphones sometime in two thousand fourteen, and it may very well be that by the time this podcast goes live. We will know who that manufacturer is, but as of the recording, we do not. Uh. And then we have a very sad story to round out January of two thousand thirteen, which was on January eleventh, two

thousand thirteen, Aaron Swartz committed suicide. Uh. Swartz was one of the people who worked on Really Simple Syndication RSS. Uh. He was. He was a hacker and an activist. He was He was a deep member of all of these communities that were based around the building of the Worldwide Web. Yeah. He was very much involved in the development of Reddit.

He was very active with Creative Commons, and he was a proponent of the idea that information wants to be free, and in fact had been charged with breaking and entering by m I T Campus police when he was using unauthorized He was using a computer to download massive amounts of documents from j Store, which is you know, you know, it's a it's an academic um database of papers, and presumably with the intent of distributing them freely, because information

wants to be free. Uh. He you know. M I T eventually decided not to pursue charges, but the federal government did not have that same point of view. They actually when after sworts On on multiple charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act UH Sports, his lawyers offered to have a plea bargain, but the prosecutors refused the

plea bargain. Yeah, they were being really I mean, and the sentence that they were putting out there was thirty five years in prison and about a million dollars in five Yeah, and there were other you know, things tacked onto there. This actually prompted a big discussion in the tech world about whether or not the federal government was trying to use sports as an example to try and frighten other people by going after sports with such gusto

and refusing to do any sort of plea bargain. And UM, two days after the denial of the plea bargain came through, that's when Sports committed suicide. And it was this is a very complicated issue. You can't just point a finger and say because of this, this other thing happened. I mean, it didn't stop people from trying. Oh absolutely, if you'd like to learn more about sports and UM and all of this this hubbub leading up to this tragic event.

In particular, UM, we did a memorial episode on February six. That was during kind of my learning curve of the show. I will warn you guys, right, Yeah, so there are several of the stories we'll talk about kind of relate back to some of the episodes we've done. I mean, obviously, whenever anything really big happens, we like to try and at least give some context to it on text. So definitely check that one out. But now we're ready to move on to February, which twenty eight days as a

rule are plenty. Yeah, February in this case, UM had had the beginning of kind of the saga that Intel went through during the course. Yeah, here's another one. Like you know, BlackBerry had its own saga, Intel's had one, although Intel's is is definitely different from Blackberries. Blackberries the company that people are always kind of predicting that this year will be the end of BlackBerry type thing. No

one's predicting that for Intel. But yeah, they had announced in February at the All Things deconference that they were going to be launching an Internet TV service by the end of the year, and in July they had announced that the name of the service was going to be on que I didn't realize how quickly the story had developed. I mean, I didn't realize it was only July when they named it and now actually a month ago back

in Nova Member, they started looking to offload it. Yeah, they're looking to try and sell it off to someone for around five million dollars. And you might say, well, why would a company in the very beginning of the year say they're really going to push to get into this world, this internet television world that no one has yet really cracked. You know, You've got a lot of big companies that are all vying for this, including Apple and Google. Why would they say they really want to

do it? And then they kind of bailed on it. And well, here's where the story is a little more complicated. It's because the people who were in charge at the end of the year were not the same people who were in charge at the beginning of the year. Yes, uh Ceo, Paul UHLINI thank you, I always I can never say that, and yeah, well good luck on the next one. Yeah, he stepped down and was replaced by

Brian Krisnitch. I'm gonna say it's Crescentitch, even though someone's gonna tell me that that's an inappropriate pronunciation, but that's what I'm going with. But yeah, it was, it was. It was a move where I'm with two minds of this. You know, I like seeing companies promote from within. I

think that that's a valuable thing to do. But there were a lot of analysts who said that the problem Intel faces is not that, you know, they are abusing their their talent, it's that they have kind of adhered to a similar strategy for so long that what's really needed is some new blood to stir things up. And they're look that as being a little bit old and stagy in terms of management. Yeah. So, and Crecentag is someone who has been with a company for more than

two decades. So when he stepped up a CEO, some analysts were saying, well, this is a sign that Intel is not ready to move forward. Uh and and some have argued that the on q story where now they're trying to sell off on q is, is evidence of that. So that's where they are right now. Um, something else happened in February. We got our first look at one of the next generation consoles now current generation console. Right, Yeah,

Sony got the jump on Microsoft. There they announced the PlayStation for at their own personal event in New York. It was invitation only and I didn't get an invite, so just follow along with all the live blogging. But yeah, they showed off the system. They really stressed that the system was for gamers, and that's going to be important later on in the year when we move on to the other big console. They talked about how the PlayStation four would allow you to not only play games, but

share your experience. You know, you could stream stuff on things like twitch tv. I think it was twitch TV, and then they could all you could also, UH, at least at some point, be able to hand over control of your game to someone else. So if you just can't get past that third level, if you just can't get that boss fight, you can just pass. Everybody calling Lauren up in the middle of the night. Lauren needed

to get past this guy for me. He keeps hitting me on the head with a fish, and then she would fix it for me, and then I could continue to play UH and so owe me so many coffees the next day. You'd be awake at three in the morning. If I had said ten in the morning, Oh snap, a little inside looking I guess that's just me anyway. So Sony would go on to E three and uh and after some pretty fierce competition between Sony and Microsoft.

I would say that most journalists by the end of E three were at least some might say prematurely calling Sony the winner. Yeah, I mean the winner. Yeah, so um yeah, and then it did. It did pretty well on its release, although I mean it's hard to compare to the Xbox One is we'll talk about a little bit later because Microsoft isn't really releasing numbers. But um, but Sony has said that they sold a hundred I'm sorry, I'm sorry, one million units um, and they were only

selling the console in two nations at that time. So yeah, a good job for them. Uh. Next, we have one of the spawns is of our show occasionally Netflix. Right, they introduced their original series House of Cards. That was the first original series that they had come out with. Yeah, yeah, they and and of course the way Netflix does it is different from the way you would watch a show

on TV. You know, on on television you get it week after week, so you get one episode per week and then you have to wait a week to see the next one. Netflix said Okay, we've produced this series and we're going to serve up the entire season at once, so so you can you can already mainline it just and you can just set aside a weekend and just watch Kevin Spacey be progressively more and more nasty. I've watched some of this and he is amazingly amoral in

this in this show. I haven't caught it yet, but um but they did. They did release also following that, um the next season of Arrested Development, and also the first season of Orange is a New Black, which I have not Oh it's so good. Um uh. And yeah, there was overall a trend in of more companies doing more original series on streaming video on demand. Yeah, Hulu had already launched a couple of scripted series in two thousand twelve, and they continued to do that in two

thousand thirteen, and Amazon Prime same thing. They had produced a couple and they were working on more. So you can see shows on all three of those services. And those aren't the only three, but those are the three big. Yeah. If you want to learn more about that, you can see our episodes about streaming video on demand UMU. Primarily videos in the stream which came out September. There you go.

So before we get onto the next half of the first half of two thousand thirteen, I think I think the Q two is really what you would say, they're Q two. Okay, before we go on to Q two, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsored all right, let's march on with March of two thousand thirteen, and Lauren judges me. Some things, by the way, remain consistent throughout two thousand thirteen, including Lauren shaking her head and just staring at me with disapproval. Hey, at least I

don't laugh uncontrollably anymore. I feel like that. Yeah, yeah, no, just once she got over the the laughter thing, now I just get the judging. So that's fine. That's my friend. Matt refers to that as my laugh number twenty one, nervous laugh number twenty one. Apparently I have a lot of them. Mll It's good to be versatile. So moving on to March two thousand thirteen, Um, what just really quickly, T Mobile did something pretty pretty unheard of in the

four major carriers of cell phone services in the United States. Right, Europe is gonna go like this is such old news in the US, it was. It was pretty Uh, it's like a Maverick move. Yeah, they introduced no contract service plans yep, which uh, you know doesn't necessarily mean that you would be better off with that versus a contract one. It would be a case by case basis, but it did mean that it suddenly, you know, US customers had

more options. So it needs to be seen how this is going to affect the rest of the industry over the next few years. But I'm very curious to see if this move ends up being something that's transformative or if it's just a little blip in the radar. Its too early to say right now. And in other relatively small news that made perhaps a bigger splash in our personal lives, Google announced in March that it was going

to shut down Google Reader. Yeah. This is what caused me to say, no, that's that is literally what he did, like in the middle of the office. I'm pretty sure it was pretty bad. Yeah, Um, that's that. That was their RSS service. Yeah, that was if you wanted some sort of RSS reader, this was one of the ones that could work pretty well. You could divide it up into different categories and stuff and there were plenty of other options out there, oh yeah, and and Google suggested

many other good ones as replacements. Exactly, they weren't. They were like, we understand that some of you are very passionate about this, but the problem is that even with all of your passion, you're still very few vocal minority. Yeah. So it was one of those things where as a company, I totally understand why they were doing this. They were saying,

you know, we've got a lot of projects. We have to devote some attention to all of them, and it makes more sense for us to go ahead and shut down things that are not terribly successful so that we can devote that kind of time and attention to something else, which really, in the long run became sort of okay because March was also the month that Google announced their

their beta of Google Glass. Yeah, Project Glass. You know, it seems so weird, Like I imagine that because I have a pair of these, Um, technically the office has a pair of these. They're just in my possession. They kind of reside with Jonathan most I turned into golem with the ring he does. Yeah, very I've led a couple of people wear them, But I get real ansy um. But anyway, Project Glass was the it. You probably see them.

They're the glasses that have the little bitty cube on them where you can use that as a screen and take pictures with them, take video. We do some apps to navigation, some web search connects by a bluetoo their WiFi, a little bit of a vocal command in there, so that you don't say, okay glass to take a picture, take a video, record a video, recorded video, take a picture yet. Yeah, because I had a lot of fun

with that a dragon con. I went drunken and people will be like, you took my picture with the future, and I'm like, yes, I did. So I think I think Jonathan got more people coming up to him to ask they could take a picture of him taking a picture of something with his Google Glass. Yeah. Yeah, I was not the celebrity in that room. Google Glass was the celebrity anyway. Yeah. It's it's a program that has

recently opened up a little bit more. They've allowed some of the pioneers of the Google Beta program to uh invite a couple of other people to join. So I think it's it's either two or three. I haven't received the email myself. Yet, but it's two or three people that you can then extend an invitation to and then they have the option to join, although that option comes with a pretty hefty price tag. Yeah, it's all for a headset, pretty expensive stuff. And it is still a

prototype version. This is absolutely not a consumer level. No. I understand that it's an updated version of the headset, but it's still it's still kind of a beta headset. It's not not meant to be the kind that you would get, assuming this ever becomes an actual consumer product, the ones that you'll see in stores will probably look a little different. Um. And then there's a Kickstarter story we have to cover. It's we don't have to, but

I thought it'd be interesting. So, you know, kickstarters mostly meant for for or we tend to think of kickstars being meant for people who for a small independent projects. Yeah, some artists who want to get something a project off the ground, or maybe it would be entrepreneur who needs a little starting capital but has a really strong idea. But in this case, it was creators of a cult television show that had a passionate but relatively small following,

that show being Veronica Mars. They decided to hold a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising two million dollars so that they could produce a Veronica Mars movie that would be set approximately the same number of years after the series it ended as actual time had passed. Uh, And it met that initial goal in eleven hours. Yeah, and then eventually raised five point seven millions, so they

went above what they their original projection was. By the way, a two million dollar budget for a movie is incredibly small. I'm wondering, and I wondered then, and I still wonder now. If the kick started campaign was less about raising money and more about demonstrating that there is an audience for that particular film, I would strongly suspect that they're going to get investment from other sources. Yeah. I can't imagine that they're able to even complete a full thirty minutes

on two million dollars. I'm sure. I'm sure that they could. If they really wanted to mus be like the Veronica Mars Suck puppet Show, it would be the light version. UM. Also in March of this year, UM Facebook CEO Cheryl Sandberg published her book Lean In, which was kind of uh follow up piece to a Ted talk that she had done back in I believe, um, and and this is this is more of a women in industry sort

of thing than a tech news thing in particular. But you know, Sandberg is is the leader of one of tech's biggest companies. And so therefore the publication of a book about what it's like to be a woman in tech and and a woman in big business is is a is a pretty big thing. And it's and it's a big issue, um, you know, especially when you consider the kind of dismal percentages of women in tech and

women in leadership. I did. I did a guest episode of a run Stuff Mom Never Told Use Stems series on November six, if you want to go check that out. But um, but yeah, it's like only like a quarter of professional computing occupations in the US are held by women, and um, only twenty of of chief information officer positions at the at the fortune to fifty companies are held by women. And so you know, these are these are big things, and and the trends are not seeming to

get better right now. So so I think it's really cool that you published this. Then it became a huge news item, right because that could potentially inspire other women to go into a field that that traditionally they might feel like there's some social or cultural pressures to keep them out, when in reality we benefit from being able to take advantage of talent, no matter where that talent

might fall across the field. Of course, yeah, and and and at the very least encourage more discussion about the issue and why this is, yes, exactly, raising awareness is a great thing. Moving on to April, we only have one item for April because it's a foolish month. We don't like to spend a lot of time there. But

but it but it was a Google thing and pretty Google. Yeah, I mean it made me wish that it was a different town with an that starts with a that they had talked about Google is moving Google Fiber into Austin, Texas, and in fact, you know they're already doing that now, but that this was back when they announced that that was going to be the next city they were targeting. Right, Initially it had only been in Kansas City. Yeah, both Kansas cities, but yes, because there are two of them

way by a river. But yes, yes, Kansas City was the initial proving grounds of Google Fiber in Austin, Texas, out of all the different places in the United States, was the next one. So keep Austin weird at an incredibly high download rates. So for all my friends in Austin, I hope you enjoy your one gigabit per second download speed. Yeah. Meanwhile, I will continue to make smoke signals at the top of my house in hopes of connecting to Gmail. Moving on to May. So, uh oh boy, you remember doing

this podcast? Yeah? Okay, So this company called Defense Distributed, I mean, and and and really mostly this guy named Cody Wilson, who was the founder of Defense Distributed, figured out he designed a three D printed gun only used one um like basically a hardware store nail to pin everything together and everything else was something that you could print, assuming you had the the appropriately sophisticated three D printer and and the appropriate plastics to use it, because if

you were to use weaker plastics, you could have a catastrophic failure of your of your weapon, which could cause injury or death. All right, we we did a whole episode about that on May twenty two, and um and I was, I mean, I remember being fond of it. I haven't listened to it in a minute. But there was a lot of really interesting information and press about all of this, and it was a firing pin, not like some kind of like lynch pin of the gun

I miss spoke a moment ago. But it was funny because I remember in that episode we certainly didn't give Cody Wilson much quarter. And I haven't felt a lot differently since then. I understand at least what his expressed motivations were. And I mean, I I get it, and it's not like it's not like it's a world we live in now where we can somehow take that away. It was going to happen sooner or later. And I

think that it was an interesting political statement. Um. I I kind of do appreciate the um anarchist sort of bent of it, of of just going like, no, really, you need to be paying attention to this technology because this is in fact what it can do. Yeah. I just wish he had been a little less cavalier about the whole thing, because that that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I was like, I get off my lawn, don't shoot me. Um. But yeah, since then, we've seen

some other developments. For example, there's a company called Solid Concepts that printed a three D gun in metal, not in plastic, showing that they you could actually do this with again, uh sophisticated three D printer. Obviously, the metal ones are not ones that you're going to find the consumer market. These are right right, and I mean even the plastic ones that you would need for something like this around like ten dollars and they're talking pretty expensive.

You could probably buy a lot more guns traditionally, yeah, or even rent one for for more choply than that. And then Philadelphia is the first city in the United States that has passed legislation banning the printing of guns within that city. Although how they would ever expect to actually yeah, how I don't know if it's an enforceable law. Maybe they can work together with the n s A and creep on people a lot, right, The n s A knows everything you're printing, so you know, it can

just be a little tag team. They just can't. They just can't let it be known that they found out from the n s A because the n s A is supposed to be for four and each We'll talk more about the n s A later. So May it was also the month when the other big console company announced their entry into the war for the next generation of consoles. Right, Microsoft finally unveiled their Xbox one. Yep, so they first they put to bed the whole idea of it being called Xbox seven twenty, which is good

because one of their initial ideas. Yeah, those of us who have trouble with math would rapidly have problems in a couple of generations. I'm referring to myself with that, by the way. So Microsoft unveils Xbox One, and mostly at that first event when they first unveiled it, they

weren't really looking at the games so much. Yeah, unlike PlayStation's uh idea for their launch, they were really talking about all of the other media center factors that that they were planning, right, Yeah, things like being able to control your cable box and and have some interactivity with things like sports. Sports played a big role in that initial announcement, including things like getting stats on players in

real time that kind of stuff. And also they talked a lot about the the kind of peripheral abilities of the console, specifically the new version of Connect with all the voice and gesture controls, but not so much on games. It wouldn't be until E three before Xbox really started talking about the games that would be coming out for that system. And unfortunately, also at E three, they made

a few announcements that were very unpopular amongst the gaming public. Yeah, the big one being that the Xbox One was going to require a persistent connection to the Internet or else it would not work, and people like that it needed to phone home like once a day or some thing like that in order to you know, confirm that you were still using entirely up and up software and then you hadn't stolen anything, right that that all the copies of everything you were running and actually belonged to you

weren't being used by someone else, that kind of thing, and people objected to it. They said, well, you know, not everyone has a persistent Internet connection and they want

to buy your product, but they can't use it. And eventually Microsoft ended up backing down on a lot of those initial stances, and um, they also said that as a result of making those concessions, some of the features they had planned for the Xbox would no longer work because they required that first element that they had backed off on, and that got people upset too. And I'm like, well,

you can't win, guys. You gotta you have to be like, well, either I'm okay with all of it, or I'm okay that a lot of it goes away if they take away the one thing that I really hate. I I think that they probably could have found workarounds for some of those, and that some some of those workarounds might still be coming in the next several months. But these are these are things that they may find a way of implementing in in other ways further down the line.

I mean, just like the PS four, the Xbox one doesn't have the full functionality they talked about. Yeah, although it did sell the same one million units in twenty four hours that the PS four did. Yeah, it's just they I think they were in eleven countries and not just two. So I mean, so it's it's and yeah, and they're being a little bit more squirrely about their numbers.

Like I think I said earlier, they did at one point say like in in eighteen days, we sold something like more than two million units, or essentially they were saying that the sales were exceeding their expectations, and so they weren't being so upfront with exactly what their expectations were. But yeah, they're selling quite well, probably from what I can tell mostly this is anecdotal, probably not as well as the PS four at least initially. But you know,

these things are going in. This is a long tail type of game, and it's gonna We're gonna have to see when, especially yeah, since since a lot of the games that they're talking about being really hot are not going to be out until at the earliest, right right. I like the games that are the launch titles for both of these consoles are I've mentioned this before. They're not games that particularly strike me as you know, must have. Yeah, so there's none of them. None of them are the

killer apps. So I'm still waiting. Um. Moving on, Yahoo bought Tumbler for one point one billion dollars, which is so much money. I mean, I mean not the Tumbler isn't worth it. I think it's a very up and coming um social media platform. Absolutely, and uh and everyone on Tumbler was really, really, really worried about this because the image of Tumbler is young and hip and silly and and full of irreverence, full of reverence. Yeah, and and the image of Yahoo is basically the polar opposite

of all of that. Yes, the company that has the name Yahoo with an exclamation mark at the end of it is just a bunch of old fuddy duddies. What it's not international business machine people, come on not. Nonetheless, there was some concern, especially considering the way that Yahoo has in the past handled a lot of it's large, large design decisions and commenting decisions. And I mean, I think Yahoo was the original site on which I decided that I can't read comments on the Internet anymore. I

can understand that. Yeah, And to be fair, the Yahoo executives have all said that they have no plans of screwing up Tumbler and doing anything different. But as long as it's just a change in ownership but not a

change in administration, than things should go pretty well. But we're gonna wrap up this first episode about a look back on two thousand thirteen with possibly the biggest story of We wish we could save this for the end of the last episode, but it happened in the middle of the year, so we've got to talk about it.

It's it's the only one that I referred to in my notes entirely in caps lock about Yeah, okay, So what we're clearly talking about is when Steve will Hit actually explained how his invention the graphics interchange format, how you were supposed to pronounce the acronym uh and it's jeff, which is wrong, and I won't do it. No, it's right. That is so right. That's the only clear way to say it. Gift, gift is gift because if you put a T at the end, it'd be gift. It wouldn't

be jift. Jeff is a peanut butter gif is graphic. Gift sounds ridiculous, jiffun graphic, gift graphic it makes sense, Jeff graphic. No, you don't have graphics. I have graffics. Do you have a park for him? Welcome to Giraffic Park. Alright. So, anyway, that wraps up this first episode of our look back on twirteen. Tune in next time when we find out what happened at the end of the year. So we're

gonna wrap this up. If you guys have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, if you have a specific technology wants to talk about a company, or if any of these things that we have not gone in depth about you'd like to hear more on. Yeah, maybe you're like, Hey, I really want to have a full minute discussion about gift versus Jeff. Let us know if you are that person, Write us an email. Our address is tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us

a line on Tumbler, Twitter, or Facebook. You can find us with the handle text stuff hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it have staff works dot com